PHOTOS FROM THE ARCHIVES

Every once in awhile we like to dig up some old snapshots from our files and from The Donald Gordon Collection.

You might well ask, just who is Donald Gordon, and how did we come by his stash of great photos?

John Madden, our late pal and fellow classic movie-lover, bequeathed to Joe a veritable treasure trove of informal, impromptu black-and-white photographs that more than anything we can think of provide informal, personalized glimpses of Hollywood in its Golden Age. Donald Gordon and John were close friends.

Before he died Donald gave John this marvelous cache of photos. These snapshots are the kind that are often taken at parties, outings and family events of one kind or another.

But these were not the usual shots of unrecognizable or forgotten relatives at their leisure. No, the subjects in these snapshots were – and perhaps still are — some of the most recognizable faces on the planet. And in most shots there is also Donald Gordon.

Donald was a young actor who found himself under contract at Columbia Pictures during World War II.

The amazing informality – almost intimacy – of Donald with his subjects is a pleasure to behold. No posed studio shots in full makeup, staged with the precision of a Swiss watch. These were shots of some of Hollywood’s best-known personalities in mufti, so to speak, lounging around pools, front lawns, departing restaurants or in actual costume on the set.

The photographs evoke a smaller, more neighborly and much different Hollywood – before television became a mass medium, decades before videos and DVDs, and an eternity away from the internet and the many digital platforms of today.

Celebrityhood hadn’t quite become the national obsession it is today. There were no paparazzi as such (by the way, which film inspired that descriptive term?) and access to the highest-level stars was made possible by being a member of a studio family, as Donald was.

His snapshots reveal a sunnier, more relaxed, more human Hollywood. It’s not too grandiose to suggest that they capture precious moments in time.

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DONALD GORDON was not alone in having a photo stash from the good old days of HOLLYWOOD…

Not just people in the studio PR departments, steno girls, poster, studio guards and even studio drivers.

Come the 1960’s as the old timers, the ones that knew where the bodies were buried so to speak, the ones that spent their whole career with just one studio and now were retiring… And with changing times and changing studio administrations, so many of these photos were being discarded and thrown in the dumpsters.

Even in the 1970’s when I was starting out, it wasn’t uncommon to see scavengers going through the trash and finding a wealth of studio history – PR photos, casual snapshots of the stars, studio memos and scripts from so many iconic movies… At Disney, you’d find fantastic animation cells dumped. They used to wipe the cells clean and re-use them, and later on they realized there was big money to be made just by framing them and offering them from sale.

Now all that stuff is really valuable and today it’s called movie memorabilia.

The BEST photo stills are the casual ones, the kind that crew members take of a star when they personally know them.

So much of HOLLYWOOD’s history ended up in dumpsters, with studios later prosecuting those who try to rescue it. And unfortunately even when it was ‘saved’ when that person died, their family and heirs would then trash it rather than go through the boxes to see it’s value.

“By being a member of a studio family” as Joe & Frank write, when studio employees used to work for studios and not payroll companies and tax shells. When the guard at the gate knew your name regardless of your position. You didn’t need ID badges, security clearances, and you didn’t need to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Back then, you had personal access to the stars… Now with their entourages, bodyguards and blacked-out luxury limos and SUV’s, it’s almost a hanging offence just to make eye contact with them -let alone snap their picture!